How Old Are Saturn’s Rings?

The rings around Saturn make it one of the most beautiful telescopic objects in the sky. Italian astronomer Galileo admired the planet almost 400 years ago, and wrote of its ‘peculiar appearance’ in 1610.

But
it was 1655 before the beautiful ring structure around Saturn was identified—by
Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens.

Since then, numerous researchers have added to our understanding
of Saturn’s rings. In the 1980s, American space vessels Voyager 1 and
2 took close-up photographs of Saturn. They showed many hundreds of rings around
our second-largest planet. The halo of rings is so enormous that 20 planet Earths
side by side would still not quite reach the rings' width of more than 255,000
kilometres (160,000 miles).

Many astronomers have been puzzled about how the intricate details
of Saturn’s rings could remain in place for billions of years—if
indeed the solar system is that old. Even some evolutionist astronomers cannot
believe the rings are as old as the ‘evolutionary’ age claimed for
the solar system (about five billion years). They admit that the rings cannot
be more than 100 million years old, so they propose that they formed from the
break-up of a small moon that once circled Saturn.

Astronomer Wing-Huan Ip, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy,
looked into the conditions necessary for a moon to break up. He says the combined
mass of Saturn’s rings would amount to a moon at least 100 kilometres
wide (Earth’s moon is 3,473 kilometres wide). Ip says that such a moon
could be shattered by a comet only two kilometres across. Yet Ip calculates
that such a ring-forming collision would not happen in 30 billion years.
This is about twice the age claimed for the universe by most evolutionists.

Laurance R. Doyle (NASA) of Ames Research Center, and colleagues
also support a relatively young age for Saturn's rings. They examined 14 images
taken by Voyager’s cameras to find the reflectivity of Saturn’s
brightest ring. They found that the particles forming the ring are most likely
coated with fine, dust-like ice. They say that micro-meteoroids would gradually
erode and darken the particle surfaces. Even if the grains began as pure ice
they would be blackened after only 100 million years. ‘If the rings have
existed… since the origin of the solar system’, they say, ‘they
should be much darker than they presently are.’

From these claims, the problems for evolutionists are these:

Saturn is believed to be billions of years old, but the present condition
of its rings means they can't be more than 100 million years old.

The universe is believed to be about 15 billion years old, but the circumstances
which might form Saturn's rings could not possibly happen in this time.

It should be noted that if Saturn has had rings since the solar system was formed, this
undermines belief in the long ages proposed by evolutionists.

The evidence is consistent with the creationist belief that Saturn and its rings were
created recently.

(This article is based on information in Sky and Telescope, July 1989, pp 10-11.)